Posts by author
David Biespiel
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Moderate Giftedness
Last week I misquoted W. H. Auden in this space. I could confirm the correct quote for you if only I could find my Collected edition of Auden’s poems. That book, for some reason, has fled the shelf. God knows…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Fading of September 11
We live in a world where whenever the discussion turns to humanitarian assistance or military intervention what is meant by that is American assistance and American intervention. There are good reasons for this fact. It was the United States that…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Death of the Natural
I mean, his [Heaney’s] verse is under my skin. His verbs are inside my veins. His metaphors are in my nervous system. His moral clarity is a light inside my own, shall we say, republic of conscience.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Cynicism of Mark Edmundson, Or Poetry Is Still Not Dead
Mark Edmundson’s take down of contemporary American poetry, “Poetry Slam,” (currently behind the paywall) in this month’s issue of Harper’s, is not so bad really. He’s right about the insularity of the American poetic idiom, the stranglehold of deconstructive theory…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and Bad Judgment
Asked by James Dickey why he got “into this,” meaning into the literary business, into poetry, Robert Penn Warren says, “bad judgment.” I suppose, one thinks about this sort of thing often when one is bleeding poems into existence. One…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Syria’s Poets Under Threat
The debate about political poetry in the United States sometimes has an arid feel to it. Essential, yes. But fatally so? Not very often. But poets caught up in violent political events are brethren. I believe it is essential for…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: What is Lyric Poetry II
Back in December last year I offered not so much ten definitions but ten clues, fixings, or renditions about lyric poetry. A couple dozen of you chimed in as well, which was fabulous. Let’s do it again! Here’s round two.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Boston Stands in a Sahara of Blood
“The old South Boston Aquarium stands / in a Sahara of snow now,” begins Robert Lowell’s masterpiece, “For the Union Dead,” a poem about race and class in Boston. To my mind, it’s one of the great American poems of…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Politics and Post-Modernism?
No one can know for sure what literary historians will make of it, least of all me as I pound out an editorial about poetry every week. But if I were a betting man, I would wager that the most…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Republican House Set to Banish Poets from America
“The subcommittee’s bill breaks the promise that this country has made to poets”
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl meets Gay Marriage
Yesterday was the 56th anniversary of the day that U.S. customs agents seized some 500 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl on the grounds of obscenity. Yesterday and today, the Supreme Court of the United States heard two cases regarding marriage.…
